Editorial

Editorial: Revisiting Latin American communication and culture

Author:

Yennué Zárate

Communication and Media Research Institute University of Westminster, UK

Abstract

Latin America is a multicultural territory with a longstanding mosaic of identities and hybrid cultures (Garcia‐Canclini, 2005) in continuous transformation. A melting pot of distinctive heterogeneity and difference, from the indigenous ancestry blended with European, African, and Asian migrations. Hall (1987) would call it the ‘moveable feast’, transformed progressively by cultural systems around us, now intensified with globalization. ln recent decades, upheavals in social, economic, and political processes pervaded the region. Military dictatorships, civil wars in Guatemala, Nicaragua, and El Salvador, Argentina’s Dirty War, the ongoing armed conflict in Colombia and, more recently, Mexico’s violent drug war ‐ to name a few examples ‐ have all had devastating effects. The region is also fraught with relentlessness problems of poverty, socio economic inequality, and exclusion throughout. These are issues that need to be addressed in relation to the region’s integration into the global economic and political order. In recent transitions to democratic and neoliberal regimes in the region, particularly during the last decade, the shift to left‐wing progressive governments has been a distinctive feature of South America that have changed the geopolitical, social and economic map. Also, as migration flows have increased across the continent, and European capitals, the boundaries of Latin American cultures have been redrawn (Waisbord, 1998) and the hybridisation process pushed further.